Holocaust Survivor Translates Homer’s Odyssey Into his Mother Tongue, Ladino

Moshe Ha’elyon, an Auschwitz survivor, IDF veteran, and author, published his translation of Homer’s works translated from Greek to Ladino.

His life has been a terrible odyssey and his similarities with Homer’s character Odysseus’ ordeals are remarkable. Ha’elyon survived 21 months in Auschwitz, two death marches and a number of Nazi concentration camps. The tip of the iceberg was being held captive by the British on an illegal immigrants’ ship after World War II and his wounds in the War of Independence.

Having written his autobiography – rather a modern version of Odyssey –  now, at the age of 87, he went on to translate Homer’s Odyssey into Ladino, a Jewish dialect.

Ha’elyon’s beginnings were in Thessaloniki where he was born in 1925. Ancient Greek was part of his studies in school and he learned the Odyssey and the Iliad in junior High School. When the persecution of the Jews in Thessaloniki began, in 1942, Ha’elyon was sent with his family to Auschwitz. Most of them were killed, but he got lucky and managed to survive thanks to… the Greek language. How? Giving Greek lessons to a Christian prisoner who had special privileges, and who paid for the lessons in food.

The idea to translate “The Odyssey” was given to him by a Ladino scholar. Ha’elyon actually began with “The Iliad,” but stopped because the text was longer and “a little more difficult.”

The translation took Ha’elyon almost four years, dealing with numerous difficulties along the way, because Ladino is a spoken language and the author had not finished High School due to the war. He admitted that he didn’t make up any words but was rather “loyal” to his mother-tongue.

This week is the launch of the first of the book’s two volumes in Israel. The book is dedicated to Israel’s fifth president, Yitzhak Navon, on his 90th birthday. Ha’elyon has promised to translate the “Iliad” too.